Orson Scott Card Fouls His Own Nest

[_ldsfaqs]

Yes, I read the article already, linked from your site.

I'm only stating that while he was wrong in those specific statements, I don't think they are represented of his full views of those issues which give a more wiser approach. Of course, and yes he is sometimes just wrong, and he does have a few liberal leanings.

Anyway, just mentioning that there is more I'm sure he could say on those issues which would be more reasoned.

[_Hermes]

All people who participate in national politics actively these days (e.g. by voting for Republican or Democratic candidates for president) are socialists. They believe in the power of central planning. They give strength to bureaucracy (which works the way it works, the whole world over: there is no vast different between American bureaucracy and Soviet or Chinese bureaucracy; all the bureaucracies are more similar than different, a fact that our obsession with ideology tends to obscure). Instead of reading polemics by strident partisans (arguing for or against some -ism), read novels. Standing in a bread-line in Soviet Russia is not that different from standing in line at the DMV in the good old USA. Prisons in the USA are not that different from prisons elsewhere. Nukes here are like nukes there. Armies here are like armies there. Police here are like police there. Stupid polemical arguments here are like stupid polemical arguments there.

The kind of freedom that I care about is not a word in a particular language. It does not depend on how a bunch of robed dudes interpret an arcane document. It does not depend on you or me or any of us. It is bigger than everyone, individually and collectively. You cannot control it, no matter how many bombs you make or laws you pass. I don't have to fight to protect this freedom from you or anyone else because it doesn't need protection. In fact, to protect this freedom is to lose it. It is not secure. It is not securable. You can worry about it obsessively or pay it no mind, and it doesn't give a damn. It just goes on existing, enabling your life and everyone else's, until some unforeseen moment when it decides that someone or something stops living. The market drops. Cancer appears. A tsunami strikes. An earthquake hits your nuclear reactor. Lights out. No timeouts. No instant replay. No referees. No rules. No system to game.

Freedom is embracing this reality--knowing that you don't know reality, that nobody knows it, and that this moment of ignorance is unexpectedly, inexplicably sweet. How delicious that we are all alive! How wonderful that we can speak, think, and even move with purpose every now and then and accomplish things (not because we have any right to them, but because luck conspires to enable our feeble gestures). Why ruin this blessing by attempting to muzzle it? How can I drag myself away from the joy of my own experience long enough to ruin yours (by trying to make it just like mine)? How does it build my delight in life to deny yours (or vice versa)? Live and let live (and die) is the credo of the really free man. I am not threatened by your happiness, even when it is not mine. I know that I am dying. I embrace death with the same joy that I feel for life, since life and death are really the same thing (life is built out of death: every step away from one kind of death draws me that much closer to another one). Freedom is knowing the outcome (I must die) and not caring (I shall make a beautiful death, whenever my moment comes). Freedom is not giving a damn whether other people are capitalists or communists. Freedom is not giving a damn whether gays marry or not. Freedom is not giving a damn whether the Constitution says this or that. Freedom is not giving a damn whether God did this or the devil that. Freedom is not giving a damn (not because you are an angry nihilist who rejects all meaning in life, but because you are a realist who sees that your personal happiness does not have to depend on outcomes outside human control).

[_ldsfaqs]

Uh.... That's not "Freedom", that's ANARCHY....

True Freedom is within Law, Eternal or otherwise, instead of slavery, being controlled outside etc., you instead controlling outcome, situations etc. according to law for which all blessings or pain is based on.

[_Hermes]

Anarchy is an imaginary thing. It does not exist in real human experience. It is a mythical place where there is no regularity, no order at all. Real life contains no such places (not even Somalia).

[_moksha]

In fact, to protect this freedom is to lose it. It is not secure. It is not securable. ...The market drops. Cancer appears. A tsunami strikes. An earthquake hits your nuclear reactor. Lights out. No timeouts. No instant replay. No referees. No rules. No system to game.

You are right, this land of uncertainty without rules is not anarchy, it is more like Droopy's Shangri-La.

Freedom is embracing this reality--knowing that you don't know reality, that nobody knows it, and that this moment of ignorance is unexpectedly, inexplicably sweet.

Add some hot along with this sweet and we could have a nice curry.

[_ldsfaqs]

Anarchy is an imaginary thing. It does not exist in real human experience. It is a mythical place where there is no regularity, no order at all. Real life contains no such places (not even Somalia).

You're right, but the reason is because there are laws etc. governing human behavior.
Thus, while your tretease was poetic and profound in ways, it was entirely absent of reality.

[_Hermes]

I love Droopy, more when I don't have to care what his silly opinions are (i.e. when I am free to ignore him).

I like curry, too.

[_Hermes]

You're right, but the reason is because there are laws etc. governing human behavior. Thus, while your treatise was poetic and profound in ways, it was entirely absent of reality.

No. The reason there are laws is that there is no such thing as anarchy. Order exists before we codify it as law. When law works badly, we can scrap or repair it without destroying all order. There is no such thing as a law that should never be broken (or criticized, when it works badly).

I don't refrain from crimes because there are laws against them. Most crimes I avoid entirely "by accident" (i.e. by staying away from the contexts where they occur because my lifepath has made this avoidance intuitively easy: I am not regularly in a position to commit felonies). I have not read all the lawbooks. I have no clue what precisely is illegal in any locale I have ever inhabited (and sometimes, certain laws on the books where I live have been really, really stupid--e.g. laws forbidding the eating of chicken with a fork, dancing with horses, etc.). The obvious crimes I avoid because I am naturally inclined not to murder, not to rape, not to hurt other people needlessly. There was never a time in my life when I really, really wanted to go out and slaughter people and/or otherwise violate them (their physical integrity or their property rights). Like everybody else out there, I have an intuitive sense of right and wrong. Since I was fortunate not to be born a psychopath, my sense agrees pretty closely with that of most ordinary folk around me. I don't have to go through therapy and/or be jailed to keep the community safe.

There exists this wrong idea in the world that people are only nice because somebody writes something down somewhere, and somebody else comes around with a gun to make sure we all do what the writing says. This is not true anywhere. Even where the writing exists, the criminal thugs don't live by it. The writing expresses something that exists prior to it, something that is bigger than it is. Freedom is seeing this reality and not freaking out over the writing. Real life is not about words or concepts or codified law. Law is a tool for helping human beings deal with real life, but like all tools it is not always helpful. We have to learn how to use it skillfully. We can never do this if we treat it as something impossibly sacred (so that dancing with a horse becomes just as evil as rape or murder: that is nonsense, as nonsensical as the dumb equation between fornication and looking upon a woman to lust after her, let alone the really dumb equation some people make between fornication and murder). Worshipping the law too purely makes people into dangerous idiots (who confuse dangerous crime with harmless lawbreaking).

[_ldsfaqs]

You're right, but the reason is because there are laws etc. governing human behavior. Thus, while your treatise was poetic and profound in ways, it was entirely absent of reality.

No. The reason there are laws is that there is no such thing as anarchy. Order exists before we codify it as law. When law works badly, we can scrap or repair it without destroying all order. There is no such thing as a law that should never be broken (or criticized, when it works badly).

I don't refrain from crimes because there are laws against them. Most crimes I avoid entirely "by accident" (i.e. by staying away from the contexts where they occur because my lifepath has made this avoidance intuitively easy: I am not regularly in a position to commit felonies). I have not read all the lawbooks. I have no clue what precisely is illegal in any locale I have ever inhabited (and sometimes, certain laws on the books where I live have been really, really stupid--e.g. laws forbidding the eating of chicken with a fork, dancing with horses, etc.). The obvious crimes I avoid because I am naturally inclined not to murder, not to rape, not to hurt other people needlessly. There was never a time in my life when I really, really wanted to go out and slaughter people and/or otherwise violate them (their physical integrity or their property rights). Like everybody else out there, I have an intuitive sense of right and wrong. Since I was fortunate not to be born a psychopath, my sense agrees pretty closely with that of most ordinary folk around me. I don't have to go through therapy and/or be jailed to keep the community safe.

There exists this wrong idea in the world that people are only nice because somebody writes something down somewhere, and somebody else comes around with a gun to make sure we all do what the writing says. This is not true anywhere. Even where the writing exists, the criminal thugs don't live by it. The writing expresses something that exists prior to it, something that is bigger than it is. Freedom is seeing this reality and not freaking out over the writing. Real life is not about words or concepts or codified law. Law is a tool for helping human beings deal with real life, but like all tools it is not always helpful. We have to learn how to use it skillfully. We can never do this if we treat it as something impossibly sacred (so that dancing with a horse becomes just as evil as rape or murder: that is nonsense, as nonsensical as the dumb equation between fornication and looking upon a woman to lust after her, let alone the really dumb equation some people make between fornication and murder). Worshipping the law too purely makes people into dangerous idiots (who confuse dangerous crime with harmless lawbreaking).

Hermes, I wasn't speaking of laws "only" that are written down, I was speaking of all law, ideology that is individually or collectively embraced and followed.

Further, I was calling what you wrote "Anarchy" because of what you wrote, which goes contrary to governing laws/ideology's. You addressed freedom this, freedom that over and over toward ideology's and laws that govern peoples lives which prevent's anarchy. Now you are trying to have your cake and eat it too, trying to have both.

Basically, there is no such thing as your "freedom", for you hold to ideology and law as anyone else. You're just fooling yourself thinking you don't. And if you keep going down that road, you'll be worthless to no one and accomplish nothing and even to yourself, for after all, can't have views/ideology's/laws to live by.

Further, true freedom is not relativity, it's self mastery.

[_Hermes]

My self-mastery tells me that I can reject your ideology without caring what you may do with it. By releasing any controlling interest in your ideology, I gain the freedom to build my own, and I build it the way an artist paints (piece by piece, putting in what I like and removing whatever I personally find distasteful, e.g. the notion that my marriage has to look like yours). I don't want to make the pictures somebody else wants, the ideology somebody else demands. I don't want to spend a bunch of time responding seriously to critics of my art whose opinion means nothing to me. I don't want to care deeply what they think of my art.

I don't go out of my way to make my art obnoxious. If people don't like it, I would never force them to spend any time with it (or validate it in any way: let them go and live their own lives, cultivating their own freedom by making art they can love). My encounter with reality is not theirs.

Since anarchy does not exist, there is no such thing as preventing it. My art (my personal ideology) exists to help me merge with the order I find around myself, order that exists independent of any (mythical) central ideology with absolute control. There is no absolute standard for English grammar that remains valid for all people through space and time, and yet this sentence is perfectly legible to English-speakers everywhere in the modern world. Ideology is like language. There is no ideology to rule them all. All we have in real life are individual people and communities making art (ideology) that coheres and communicates, sometimes better and sometimes worse.